um, yes. I concur. good food, food is good, BUT there things I dont eat, like sardines. sardines are not food. sushi is not food. food MUST be cooked, not merely preserved. Do I really need to clarify this as my opinion?

As long as it's your opinion, you're entitled to it. After all, Spatulas have an affinity for the skillet...

I, on the other hand, don't mind my food a little fresher, depending on what it is. Octopus tastes best before it realizes it's been chopped up. However, fresh and raw is better than preserved and raw. I can't do preserved raw seafoods too well...

Being a cook expanded my food definitions quite a bit. I'm still not crazy about things with all their organs intact, although I break that rule for most shellfish. I'm squeamish about eating insects...

I remember someone telling a story about how one of the food colorings is made from ground up exoskeletans of some insect, and they were expecting it to be the grossest thing you could imagine. I was just like, um..no that aint really gross. Oh, and supposedly people 'eat' spiders and things all the time by swallowing them in their sleep?

as for Octopus, it just seemed a bit too much like chewing gum for my likes.

I read this some decades ago in some newspaper and it has popped up on occasion in various periodicals over the years.
Apparently, we here in North America consume over 20lbs of bugs a year.
We gobble them up as tiny larval and eggs upon or in raw veggies,a small amount slipping into pots and pans,the vast majority in processed foods such as cereal.
Oh, i wholeheartedly agree with the good Dr. "fresh is best",especially shashimi,suhsi is good to.

Fruit then. Why can't a major western grocery chain stock decent tropical fruit? I'm getting to be a food snob, I guess, because I judge civilization by the distance one has to drive to get a decent mango...

I wish i could find guava here in T.O..
The canned juice and/or nector has me wondering about the texture of the fruit itself.
I find it a toss up between mangoes and guava,since i've never actually had the guava fruit i guess mango remains #one.